Among progressive voters, the spectre of Tony Abbott – either returning to the leadership or continuing to wield influence – is a call to arms.
Photograph: Glenn Hunt/AAP

GetUp is gunning for the Abbott “resistance” – the Coalition conservatives it sees as the biggest impediments to those policies it wants to change the most. It’s a new take on the large-scale grassroots campaigns that will shape the result of the looming federal election away from the glare of the leaders’ campaign trails and the headline national polls.

Unlike its previous election interventions, the online campaigning community with a membership of more than 1m is no longer targeting the seats with the most knife-edge margins but rather Coalition seats with reasonably thin margins that are also held by MPs they regard as “hard right wingers holding back progress on our key issues”.

It will add several other seats, probably including the South Australian seat of Mayo (margin 12.5%, held by the former minister Jamie Briggs) and Dawson in central Queensland (margin 7.6%, held by National George Christensen, who led the opposition to the Safe Schools program and is a strong advocate for the Galilee Basin coalmines).

With 14 organisers and hundreds of volunteers it will be door-knocking, running advertisements, using its online campaigning set-up, making telephone calls and conducting community forums to target undecided voters. It will be working with nurses and teachers, and the unions, to focus voter attention on spending cuts to hospitals and schools.

And on election day GetUp is planning to hand out how-to-vote cards similar to those the LNP unsuccessfully tried to injunct on the day it lost government in Queensland in 2015 – which told voters concerned about the reef how to vote for Labor or the Greens and advocated that they put the LNP last.

“We are going after those in the Tony Abbott ‘resistance movement’ – those who are clinging to the party’s past; those that championed the 2014 budget with all its devastating cuts to schools and hospitals; those who deliberately and systematically undermined our renewable sector as the rest of the world cashed in,” explains GetUp’s national director, Paul Oosting.

“This is the same bloc who have been holding policy ransom in the Liberal/ National party room – those who are responsible for backflips on safe schools, more progressive tax policies. Some are cabinet ministers, some are backbenchers, some are candidates that we have good reason to believe would lend themselves to conservative machinery.”

In that 2015 Queensland election, despite the state’s optional preferential voting system, the preference flow from the Greens to Labor was far higher than in previous elections and this had a big impact on the result. Ensuring progressive voters’ preferences were counted, and did not exhaust, was GetUp’s main goal and it says exit poll data shows higher preferences flows at the booths were it was most active.

But preference flows were also already likely to be stronger in that election because of voter hostility towards Campbell Newman and in a straight marginal seat campaign that emotion might not be replicated in this federal election. Voters might be underwhelmed by Turnbull’s prime ministership so far but he doesn’t attract as much outright fire-in-the-belly animosity.

But, among progressive voters, the spectre of Abbott – either returning to the leadership or continuing to wield influence – is a call to arms. Which is probably what GetUp is banking on with its new strategy.

It is impossible to disaggregate the impact of campaigns by groups like GetUp on election results.

But according to both major parties the nationwide polls – showing a tight contest and a trend towards Labor – hide huge volatility across different seats and different regions.

Economic uncertainty – fears for the future of the economy and jobs – is the central issue identified by both major parties.

And both sides are advocating levels of government intervention that leave Abbott and Joe Hockey’s “end of the age of industry entitlement” looking like a different era. Labor has been setting the agenda but the government is in the process of minimising differences, trying to hone the argument down to a simple choice between its employment-promoting policies and Labor’s spending on services, hoping that voters are not yet convinced they need to change governments again. And neither side has revealed its full spread of election offerings.

The Coalition argues Labor’s “fairness” message appeals to its base, as Ed Miliband’s campaign did in last year’s UK election, but, as in the UK, they believe it won’t sway the broad sweep of swinging voters in marginal seats. And the Liberals’ strategists Crosby Textor are adept at targeted marginal seat messaging.

But Labor thinks its message about “fairness” and relentless framing of Turnbull as being aligned with “the top end of town” is cutting through, building on the residual shock of Abbott’s unfair 2014 budget.

ReachTEL polling done for the NSW Teachers’ Federation this week showed that between 8% and 15% of Coalition voters in six NSW marginal seats were less likely to vote for the government if it did not fund the final two years’ of the “Gonski” education agreement. (The government is likely to find some extra money but not as much as Tony Abbott cut.)

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And Labor sources say Turnbull’s talk about “agility” and “innovation” and exciting times” is “poison” in working-class electorates, where workers hear it and think it’s fancy code language that means they will probably lose their jobs. Coalition MPs in outer suburban and regional seats have also complained about the language and, since the 2 July poll has become a certainty, “agility” and “excitement” have been missing from Turnbull’s rhetoric, which is narrowing down to the key message that the election is about: “Who do you trust to manage the economy and protect your jobs?”

And the campaigns by GetUp and the marginal seat campaign – planned by the ACTU in 32 marginals, both online and on the ground – will bolster Labor’s pitch.